Page 54 of Half the Summer's Night
ABI
Idon’t want to think about why, but I sleep through the night for the first time since Olivia died. Since longer than that, even.
I wake up a little before my alarm, although the sun’s already up, pouring hot and bright around the curtain. It’s easy to move through my morning routine, and I don’t feel that cold, sinking dread that’s followed me around since Olivia’s death. It’s like giving in to my killer—giving into Nameless, which is how I’ve started thinking of him—has snapped something inside me. Something that was strangling me in place.
I feel good enough that I decide to tend to the cemetery, something I haven’t done for a few weeks. Partially because of the heat, but also just because of everything else that’s happened.
I fix up a cold brew coffee before I go out. Tidying up the cemetery and laying blossoms on the empty graves was Uncle Vic’s favorite chore and one of the first things we did together when I came to live with him. He never skipped it, no matter what the weather was like.
Just a few minutes each day, he told me that first morning, the two of us winding through the cemetery with our arms full offlowers from the garden.That’s enough to keep them from being forgotten.
Uncle Vic was surprisingly superstitious for a mortician, a fact I only discovered was odd when I went off to mortuary school for myself. Still, I’ve tried my best to keep up the routine since his death, even if I’ve been lax lately.
But when I step out onto the front porch, it’s not Uncle Vic I’m thinking of. It looks different out here in the daylight, in the glare of the merciless sun. My cocktail glass is still in the grass where Nameless pushed it over, though, a reminder that it all really did happen.
I set the glass back on the railing, the memory of his touch playing over in my head. Everything we’d done had been so disrespectful to the dead. So why does it feel right? As right as plucking sunflowers and carrying them out to the cemetery?
I pick my way across my yard, sucking down the chilled, sweet coffee through a metal straw, my hair piled on top of my head to escape the heat. There’s no sign of Nameless. Not when I cut a bouquet of sunflowers. Not when I cross the still street. Not when I step into the cemetery.
I stop beside the gate, staring out at the graves. Uncle Viccertainlywouldn’t have approved of what I did out here last night, and I honestly can’t believe I did it myself. Not just that I did it, but that I sought it out. That a murderer left me alone, and I followed him into the darkness so I could take his cock in my mouth and swallow his seed.
Heat flushes through my body at the memory. God, it had felt so good in the moment, though. Soright.
I weave my way around the gravestone, dropping sunflowers one by one on the graves and reciting the names of each of the deceased like a prayer, the way Uncle Vic taught me. “Good morning, Edith,” I say to the gravestone of Edith Barlow, whodied in 1942. “And you, too, Albert.” Albert’s her husband, dead in 1938.
It’s all so familiar. Comforting, even. But my thoughts aren’t on any of that. They’re on the way the grass felt as it crushed beneath my knees, and the way Nameless’s tongue plunged up inside my pussy as I was displayed in the viewing room, and the way he denied me over and over until all I wanted was release at his hands.
I stop next to one of the cemetery’s old statues, a shrouded figure worn away by the elements. It was around here where I knelt for him. And if I look back at the house, I’ll see the window where he put my pleasure on display.
My body tightens at the memory, and I wonder, in the harsh morning light, what the hell is wrong with me.
But then I hear the soft rumbling purr of a car engine.
I turn around in time to see a blue SUV pull up in front of the house. I don’t recognize it, and I sway a little in place, clutching my metal coffee cup as tightly as I can. But then the driver steps out, and I breathe with relief when I see the tall, blonde figure of Ms. Staunton.
That relief evaporates quickly enough, though. What’s she doing here?
Dread twists up in my belly as I watch her walk toward the front door. I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of. Surely, if the police knew that I had faked the tox report for Julian Bernet, they would have been here well before her.
Unless she’s come to warn me.
She rings the doorbell and steps back, waiting. I shove my nausea aside. I can’t look suspicious. I can’t let her know the truth about me.
“Ms. Staunton!” I shout, forcing myself to walk toward the cemetery gate. “I’m over here!”
She turns around, face hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. I know she sees me, though, because she smiles and lifts her hand in a wave.
That smile smooths my nerves a little. I know what she looks like when she’s bringing bad news, and it isn’t that.
“Abi!” she calls out, jogging down the steps. “Good, I’m glad I’m not too early.”
I lay the rest of my flowers next to the gate and go to meet her in the yard. The sunflowers in the garden are all turned to face us, the petals brilliant in the morning light.
Ms. Staunton smiles at me again, brushes her hands through her hair. I squeeze my tumbler, my stomach churning too much for me to take a drink.
“Sorry, I was cleaning up the cemetery.” I’m surprised how even my voice comes out. How normal I sound. “I hadn’t done it in a while, and I don’t have any bodies to look at today.”
“Oh, that’s fine. I was worried I might be interrupting your breakfast or something. I know I ought to call first, but I was heading to court and passed by Hatch Street and I thought—well, I thought I’d check on you.”
